


The Memory and the Aftertaste

by 1863



Category: John Wick (Movies)
Genre: Guns, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:22:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21645187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1863/pseuds/1863
Summary: John cleans his guns and contemplates revenge.
Relationships: John Wick/Winston
Comments: 4
Kudos: 42
Collections: 300bpm Flash Exchange November 2019





	The Memory and the Aftertaste

**Author's Note:**

  * For [track_04](https://archiveofourown.org/users/track_04/gifts).



> The title comes from a lyric in the song prompt ([Aftertaste - Shawn Mendes](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7SQ8i6W4VI)).

John lays his weapons out on the bed: two Heckler & Koch P30Ls, each with custom compensators, and two spare magazines. Nothing else, no sidearms, no more extra bullets, not even a single blade. He knows he won’t need them — not just because he’s been casing the hotel for weeks now and knows that Winston is unprotected, but also because he knows why Winston has left himself so vulnerable. 

He’s waiting for John to find him.

John picks up one of the guns. Presses the magazine release to remove the clip, pushes on the slide lock and pulls the slide back. Checks the chamber is empty and switches up his grip, lines up the notches and pulls the slide off completely. The movements are automatic to John by now, as ingrained in muscle memory as knowing where to strike and how to fall, and John is no more conscious of what he’s doing than he is of his own heart beating, or his lungs expanding and contracting with air.

His mind starts to wander as he cleans the disassembled gun. Backwards into the past, far into the past, when he and Winston first met.

Winston offered him a drink.

“Anything you like, Jonathan. It’s on the house.”

“Bourbon,” John said. “Please,” he added, when Winston just looked at him and said nothing. John spent the rest of the meeting trying to gauge whether the smile on Winston’s face was a threat or not.

Decades later, John still isn’t sure.

He sprays some CLP onto the gun’s inner parts and starts brushing away the built-up carbon. Over the past few months John has had to clean his weapons even more often than usual, now that it’s not just mobsters and mafia and fellow hired guns on his tail. Now, the High Table itself is hunting for his head, and John has had to use these pistols a lot in order to take theirs instead.

When he first began his service, he’d used a Glock. It was Winston who gave him his first H&K, and when John made some protest and said he couldn’t accept any gifts, Winston just smiled that ambiguous smile again and told him he had no choice.

“Besides,” Winston added, “I’m sure you’ll end up paying back what it cost. In more than just gold coins, perhaps.”

And so he had, multiple times, and in more ways than one. His name became a Russian legend, his fee went through the roof, and Winston’s investment earned him the kind of dividends that John could never have imagined.

John starts wiping excess oil off the barrel, the recoil spring, off both slide stops. His fingers become slick and blackened with gunk, the grease clinging to his skin even when he tries to wipe it away. Memories of other oil-slicked fingers invade his thoughts, fingers that touched him in ways that steal his breath even now. John doesn’t fight it, just lets the memories come, knowing from experience that trying to forget is futile. In any case, he needs to remember if he’s to be prepared for this, for a confrontation that will end things once and for all. What that end is, John doesn’t know, but after months of having a target on his back he’s ready for this to be over — whatever the end may be.

Winston didn’t ask him outright, that first time. In fact, he’d barely asked out loud at all. That didn’t surprise John, and nor did the invitation itself; one of the first things John learned about Winston was that he was, first and foremost, a sybarite. He loved bespoke suits and pure silk cravats; he indulged in good food and fine wine. He constantly surrounded himself with the most luxurious, most exquisite things, admiring every beautiful trinket that crossed his line of his sight. 

Every beautiful trinket, and every beautiful man, too.

John reassembles the first gun and starts in on the second. He can still taste the jealousy at the back of his throat and has to swallow past the bitterness, remembering the way Winston’s eyes would go dark when Charon informed him that certain men — and the occasional woman — were in town. 

Winston was open in his admiration of all beautiful people but didn’t often grant them meetings face to face. And when he did, he always cancelled every other appointment he had for the day, and sometimes all his appointments for the next day, too. John knows this because he’d been with Winston more than once when it happened, when Charon made the call or came by to tell Winston the news himself. And eventually, John realised that his presence there was no mere coincidence, and never had been.

“Is that what you like?” John asked him later, when Winston had him pinned face-first against the wall. Velvet flocked wallpaper rubbed over John’s cheek as Winston thrust in again, harder this time, and faster too; so hard and so fast that John barely managed to choke out the rest of his question. “You like me being jealous?”

“No,” Winston whispered into his ear, his breath hot and his voice very low. “I like you being greedy.”

John’s fingers tighten reflexively around the barrel in his hands. He forces himself to continue with his task, to thread a patch of cloth through the hole of the cleaning rod and to push the rod through the barrel. The cloth comes out streaked with carbon and John does it again and again, until he gets a cloth that comes out clean.

Greedy, he thinks. Winston liked him greedy. Winston also liked it when John wasn’t always so pliant, when he took the initiative and proved that he remembered exactly where and how Winston liked to be touched, and tasted, and taken in. And John did remember — he remembers everything. 

But Winston’s behaviour since that morning on the roof, since he aimed and fired a gun right at John’s chest? They tell John that Winston remembers too, and now, John is going to make sure that Winston never, ever forgets. 

Not that he expects this to be easy, minimal weapons aside. Winston will fight him; of course Winston will fight him. Not with a gun, perhaps, but most certainly with words, and most likely with memories, too. Of hands and lips, and bare skin and tongue, and all the things that honey-whisky voice persuaded John to do. But the memories go both ways, and if Winston brings them up then it means he kept them close to the surface — and revisited them, maybe, for more than one reason.

John straps the cleaned and reassembled guns into place, as well as his two extra clips. He thinks of Winston telling him where Viggo’s helicopter was, of Winston giving him an hour’s grace before declaring him _excommunicado_. 

He’s always known that he wasn’t the only one who enjoyed Winston’s favour, who warmed Winston’s bed and spent long nights laid open and panting against those silken sheets. But John is the only one Winston never turned away, _never_ , and the only one allowed to give him marks that left him visibly claimed, if only for a little while. 

And today, Winston is going to find out something else that John has known all along: that those marks were far more permanent than Winston ever realised. John might have left but he made sure he couldn’t be erased, and now that the only thing Winston has of him is a fading memory — a bitter aftertaste — he knows that as hard as Winston will fight him, he's still going to win.


End file.
